Claiming the International

Arlene B. Tickner, David L. Blaney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135016975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the possibilities of alternative worldings beyond those authorized by the disciplinary norms and customs of International Relations. In response to the boundary-drawing practices of IR that privilege the historical experience and scholarly folkways of the "West, " the contributors examine the limits of even critical practice within the discipline; investigate alternative archives from India, the Caribbean, the steppes of Eurasia, the Andes, China, Japan and Southeast Asia that offer different understandings of proper rule, the relationality of identities and polities, notions of freedom and imaginations of layers of sovereignty; and demonstrate distinct modes of writing and inquiry. In doing so, the book also speaks about different possibilities for IR and for inquiry without it.

1

Introduction

Claiming the international beyond IR

David L. Blaney and Arlene B. Tickner

Claiming the International was conceived as the third in a sequence of edited books growing out of a conversation that began at the International Studies Association (ISA) meeting in Montreal in 2004. The conversation traveled for a while under the label, “Geocultural Epistemologies and IR” and morphed into the Routledge book series, “Worlding Beyond the West.” The series promises to focus on the issue of domination of the discipline by the West, explore the role of geocultural factors in determining how knowledge of world politics is produced, and seek out alternative ways of thinking about the “international.” The first two books of both the series and the original trilogy—International Relations Scholarship Around the World (Tickner and Wæver 2009) and Thinking International Relations Differently (Tickner and Blaney 2012)—explore the ways in which the field of International Relations (IR) has globalized via a set of boundary-drawing practices that inform particular modes of worlding and knowledge. The language of production is used intentionally (as opposed to diffusion) in order to highlight the geocultural conditions of possibility of IR as a globalized discipline, as well as the localized contexts beyond the West in which it is received, adopted, adapted, and/or rejected. In other words, the books have been attentive to the situatedness of knowledge and experience.

International Relations Scholarship Around the World and Thinking International Relations Differently attempt to map global variation along two distinct but complementary planes: a disciplinary and geographic one, and a thematic and geographic one, respectively. In addition to a sociology of knowledge of the state of IR in distinct countries and regions of the world and the ways in which key concepts are problematized, the two books also begin to explore the “different” contributions and conceptualizations that emerge in these sites, but that remain largely unacknowledged by or unknown to Northern-based scholars.

The aim of these books might therefore be associated with the kind of pluralizing of IR that Patrick Jackson (2011) has called for. He argues that IR scholars use an unquestioned, even unexamined, notion of “science” as a “trump card” to be played against diversity in the field. We take the author’s view that the dominant definition of “science” plays a disciplining function (Jackson 2011: 9) to indicate that IR could also be analyzed in terms of an inside–outside or core–periphery chasm that it supports. In contrast to the philosophy and history of science, where no general consensus exists as to what “scientific knowledge” is, in IR its definition has largely been a function of United States dominance and of the prevalence of rationalist positivism. However, as in the case of science, which appears as “irreducibly pluralist,” Jackson suggests that if we actually examine the process of “producing knowledge about world politics,” a plural IR discipline is also revealed (Jackson 2011: 189). He illustrates this point through a four-fold mapping of distinct philosophical ontologies that are currently operative in the field. These are described as “wagers” that determine epistemologies, theories, methods, and problems that researchers deem important (Jackson 2011: 35), and include neopositivism, critical realism, analyticism (the equivalent of constructivism), and reflexivity.

The ingenuity of this argument is that all four “ideal types” are treated from a neutral vantage point in order to show that they represent equally legitimate claims to scientific status. But the four are actually not equal in terms of the power they exert within the discipline. Neopositivism not only occupies the throne of science, granting it the power of the “god trick,” to use Donna Haraway’s (1988) famous expression, but also its followers cannot help but try and convert others into believers from this elevated position. In consequence, although a pluralist science of IR along the lines proposed by Jackson (2011) is in principal very attractive, the currently dominant strain, neopositivism, is ill-suited to accept methodological diversity. From its standpoint, pluralism would entail either inviting “non-believers” to the table (and perhaps sharing a meal with them), never actually acknowledging that they do “proper” science, or subsuming scholarship done by those who share a vaguely similar wager (such as in the global South) as inferior and “substandard.” Such a reading of pluralism (as well as potentially that of International Relations Scholarship Around the World and Thinking International Relations Differently) thus envisions a dialogue between distinct perspectives or wagers that may be nearly impossible to sustain in practice given the current structure of global intellectual production.

We would be well advised to be skeptical or at least agnostic about dialogue within the field (see Hutchings 2011). As in other kinds of social interaction, dialogue may only be possible between similar subjects or equals, not only in terms of power and resources, but perhaps more importantly, in terms of sharing access to similar worldviews or systems of knowledge. Calls for dialogue may only distract from the genuine problems affecting IR, among them its entrenched core–periphery structure, and may actually reinforce boundary-drawing practices. Take, for example, the idea of hybridity, a fashionable buzzword for myriad configurations of identity and temporality produced by transnational geocultural phenomena such as imperialism and globalization. Hybridity points simultaneously to the “factual universality” of a global project and to its incompleteness, given that the universal is always inflected with local elements (Cheah 1998: 292–4). What makes dialogue feasible is precisely its near sameness (Bilgin 2008). This is the point that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) makes when she argues that the main prerequisite for being heard is the ability to speak in the West’s (or the powerful’s) own language.

Transposing this argument to IR proper, the common framework of understanding or “sameness” that allows us to talk about dialogue with difference is essentially imposed by the core through the theories, concepts and categories it employs to think about world politics. Although re-examining them, as we did in Thinking International Relations Differently, is an important step in exploring geocultural variation, it may prove too limited in that it accepts as its own point of departure the very ideas that are at the root of the modern Western worldview (state, sovereignty, security, globalization, secularism and the “international”). The fact that dialogue with such “different” readings of these concepts seems possible may indeed suggest that their underlying difference has already been effaced. In this book, Aslı Çalkıvik (Chapter 3) makes a related argument, though focuses on critical IR theory. As in the case of the concepts and categories that are operative within the field, she points to how critique itself is disciplined by the need to be timely—to be capable of speaking to the discipline as it currently exists or to problems in global society as they are already conceived. Inanna Hamati-Ataya raises related questions about the complex issue of reflexivity and dissidence within the discipline (2011a and b) and the nearly impossible position of “representatives” of the non-West or “outsiders within” who want to do IR from beyond the West (Chapter 2, this book). We are tempted to conclude from this that critical scholarship may be equally incapable of engaging difference in genuine dialogue.

If Western understandings of the nature and purpose of dialogue contribute to occulting intellectual domination, or even to legitimating it, the task then becomes how to envision an exchange or conversation between multiple and at times contradictory perspectives where none occupy positions of power or privilege. Ideas such as “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) and “trading zone” (Galison 1996) propose just this. The notion of “decentering,” developed mostly by feminist theory (Narayan and Harding 2000; and Nayak and Selbin 2010 in IR), aims at the like-minded goal of sparking cross-border discussion by suspending entrenched modern, Western and masculine assumptions regarding its privileged access to knowledge of the world. And yet, in all of these conceptual constructs it is difficult to envision concrete steps that might actually push us in the desired direction, especially within academic practice, where epistemic violence seems most entrenched.

Expanding our definition of “science” or “authoritative” knowledge is a potentially promising strategy, provided that the widening is genuine. In attempting to strike up conversation between IR and feminist theory, Robert Keohane (1998: 195) argues for a plural social science that, almost mockingly, pushes a single and exclusionary view of method based upon causality, hypothesis testing and replication. In contrast, Jackson’s (2011: 93) definition of science, as “worldly knowledge” based upon facts but not ethical evaluation or mystical contemplation, aspires to create a larger umbrella with room for distinct ways of thinking about world politics. However, even here, especially outside the West, where divisions between material and spiritual sources of knowledge may not be as clear-cut as they are in Western thought (Tickner 2003a; Shani 2008; Acharya 2011), making enough space for wide-ranging difference continues to be an elusive goal. Perhaps, as suggested by Naeem Inayatullah (Chapter 11, this book), we need to bypass or at least complement the mode of worlding constituted by social science and by Western IR with other registers, such as literature or popular culture, that allow us to experience diversity and multiplicity in less defensive and more humane ways.

The difficulties described above help explain why our earlier explorations of how IR is done across countries and regions (Tickner and Wæver 2009; Tickner and Blaney 2012) reveal a plural field of study, though not as plural as we had imagined. These books indicate that, generally speaking, plurality in global IR is one that evolves within a (narrow) space allowed for by the United States and Western European core, which exercises a strong disciplining function in terms of the theories, concepts, and categories authorized to count as knowledge of world politics. We worry that our original premise, that achieving greater dialogue and pluralism within the field requires making visible scholarly work that has either gone unacknowledged as a legitimate contribution to knowledge or that has occupied subordinate positions, may potentially leave disciplinary foundations and power asymmetries intact, when in fact our underlying goal has been to promote their transformation. Indeed, in the introduction to Thinking International Relations Differently, we note that “this on-going exercise in ‘revealing’ difference” has been “somewhat disappointing” (Tickner and Blaney 2012: 6).

It seems clear to us now that the first two books of the trilogy were both enabled and constrained by their very conception. International Relations Scholarship Around the World begins with the question, “how is the world understood around the world?” but the topic is quickly delimited to “scholars of international relations,” under the assumption that “we are all part of a global discipline studying a shared object of interest” (Wæver and Tickner 2009: 1). The analytical exercise proposed by the editors required a boundary—the register of IR—against which variation might be revealed. The capacity to identify differences across geographic space within a “global discipline” is precisely this book’s strength. Similarly, the second book, Thinking International Relations Differently, explores variations in the treatment of key concepts: security, sovereignty, the state, secularization, globalization, and the “international.” Although this too is one of the book’s main contributions, we noted that when our chapters began “pushing beyond the frontiers of IR,” it prompted “more innovative and creative thinking” (Tickner and Blaney 2012: 14). Maybe we needed to look even farther afield, pushing more fully beyond the discipline itself. We promised that Claiming the International would begin this process by attempting to “analyze promising alternative avenues for claiming the world that transgress the boundary-drawing practice of IR in its more conventional form” (Tickner and Blaney 2012: 13).

Indeed, we associate the present book with a kind of global democratic ethos that opens up the world to be claimed by “multiple, geographically dispersed actors from many vantage points” (Chen, Hwang and Ling 2009: 744), although we are aware of the risks that granting formal “equality” may entail in terms of normalizing unequal relations of power within IR. We might also gesture toward Ashis Nandy’s explorations (2007: xi) of “diverse sources of defiance” found in “legends, informal public memories, and private and public myths” that emerge from “underprofessionalized and undersocialized” sources. In general, we use the language of claiming the international to point to myriad possibilities for alternative worldings that may exist beyond the established boundaries of IR, but also within it, including the very ways in which difference is classified and responded to (see Darby 2008: 103).

Doubts: where is beyond?

As Amitav Acharya (2011: 620) states quite pointedly, “how we develop IR into a more genuinely universal discipline depends very much on what we think is missing from it now.” Are we concerned mainly with the fact that existing theories and concepts are insufficient to account for non-Western experiences and readings of world politics? Do we feel that predominant definitions of “science” disavow scientific knowledge that fails to conform to its standards? Do we worry that attempts at inclusiveness via the development of indigenous concepts result largely in mimickry? Or is there something more? Spelling out in a clear fashion what we consider to be missing from or wrong with IR is largely what we do in this introduction. However, where this “beyond” lies leaves us with tensions and perplexities. At moments we feel optimistic that positive change is actually taking place within the boundaries of the field, largely as a result of the post-positivist debate and the feminist and postcolonial movements in the social sciences in general. In keeping with this optimism we have tried to join forces with others who have risen to challenge Western or core dominance of IR (Rajaee 1999; Dunn and Shaw 2001; Geeraerts and Jeng 2001; Inoguchi and Bacon 2001; Euben 2002; Bajpai and Mallavarapu 2005a, 2005b; Jones 2006; Hutchings 2008: 154–77; Acharya 2011; Acharya and Buzan 2007, 2010; Shilliam 2011; Lizée 2011). But at the same time, we are moved by a sense of both sadness and outrage that things may well remain pretty much the same. Arlene Tickner (Chapter 12) explores some of the reasons why this is the case, including those specific to IR and the social sciences, and others related to the crisis of academia itself as a site for meaningful knowledge.

We also feel the push and pull between the professional demands of our academic work and our political commitments and desires. At one point, we conveyed messages such as this one to contributors:

We find ourselves in an uncomfortable place. The imperative on one side is to produce a volume that is impactful and the temptation then is to figure out how to speak to the existing conversation. On the other hand, we want to change the conversation or even begin a new and different one.

The fact that we still find ourselves exercising the imperative to translate the “other” into IR points, perhaps, to an underestimation of how much of the discipline we carry w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: claiming the international beyond IR
• Part I Reflections on critical IR
• Part II Alternative archives of the state
• Part III Alternative international registers
• Part IV Writing the international differently
• Index